If there is a connection between this week's seemingly disparate readings, it seems, to me, to be this: the context language is put in matters as much as what's being said, that our mental representations of people, objects, and concepts are malleable through language.
In Lupyan's study, he uses the humble triangle to show that when we express our mental representations of objects, said expression can be affected by the context surrounding it. For example, you wouldn't expect the drawings of a "triangle" and a "three-sided polygon" to vary dramatically, but Lupyan shows that they do. ("Triangle" yields more "typical" equilateral triangles, while the "three-sided polygon" prompt is less likely to yield such shapes.) This shows that our mental representations are flexible (as a four year old's ability to recognize multiple kinds of dogs that they previously had never seen would also show) and can be primed using language. And this asks the question: How do we come up with those mental representations in the first place? What is a "typical"... anything?
That last question seems to underlay Rickford's paper, on how speakers of the African American dialect African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have been underserved by the sociolinguistic community. As Rickford makes clear, AAVE speakers have helped push forward linguistics over the decades, but have not been with the same respect and dignity from the linguistic community. I can't help but think that Lupyan's findings are important for determining exactly why this is. What is our mental representation for a "typical" dialect of English? Given that there is a dialect literally called "Standard English" (SE), it seems we don't have to look far for the answer.
If AAVE is placed in a context such that its main representation in linguistics is to help learn more about SE (in the early 90s, there was not a single speaker of AAVE employed in any linguistics department in the US), then of course there will not be due dignity given to it. How we change that context is what Rickford eventually tries to get at in his paper, and where the question gets complicated. How has the linguistic attitude towards AAVE changed since this paper was written? I am interested in learning more.
Hi Matthew!
ReplyDeleteYour connection between the two readings is really interesting—there seems to be a disparity between the idea of "Standard English" and the ideas surrounding contexts from the Lupyan reading. I do think that there is room for us to explore how AAVE has been studied, and whether we have tried to somehow classify it as a single dialect of English, versus allowing there to be space for flexibility, as suggested by Lupyan's findings. However, even if we consider these options to redefine what a dialect may mean, I don't think this condones the lack of responsibility shown by the field of linguistics toward the communities that linguists have studied and gained so much from. I also wonder whether there has been any change initiated by linguists toward African American communities since this paper was published, and whether there has been an attempt on all sides, not just in terms of AAVE, but a more systemic change in terms of the social responsibilities held by linguists. I know that the examples in class we saw of sociolinguistics seemed very thoughtful—we talked about culture alongside linguistic intricacies, but I wonder if these practices are widespread throughout the field of linguistics or only prevalent in the case studies we have gone over in class. Thanks for bringing up these interesting ideas!
-Katherine